Are we wasting our time?

Great companies want to know as much about themselves as they do about external factors like the market, the competition, and the economy. The reason for this is simple: competing for business of virtually any kind takes a tremendous amount of execution and focus, and it’s hard to do over a long period of time without focusing on your process. If a business had access to unlimited talent who could work unlimited hours, optimizing for process wouldn’t matter at all. However, the reality is that the number of individuals at your disposal is likely extremely limited (perhaps even to “just you”) and the number of productive hours you can work per week is probably capped at 40 over any reasonable amount of time, you have to be extremely careful with how you use your time.

At Shockoe, we care deeply about this problem. We built a time tracking system that we use to track the time we spend building things for clients, but recently we realized we wanted to know how we spent the rest of our time. So we started using our system to track the rest of our time, in order to answer the one, eternal question: are we wasting our time?

What we realized is that the biggest waste of time is entering all this data into a system to figure out if we were wasting our time. Data entry is hard, and the same way we have found that sales people end up getting so little out of their CRM’s because they resist entering data, we have found that we ascertain less about our daily routines than we’d like. We we’re going to try to fix it.

First we’ll be building out our internal tools for tracking our time with the most seamless data entry system possible. Then, we’ll release it into the wild. Want to try it? Drop me a line at tommy@shockoe.com. We’d love to have you help us solve this data entry beast.